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The Prophet
Original Prophet During Randale's Karse Border War, the Karsites employed mages, who went to brutal lengths, destroying whole villages. Herald-Mage Vanyel spent over a year on the border, doing the work of four mages to counter them. He also made it a personal mission to hunt down and destroy the mage responsible for the deaths of Herald-Mages Mardic and Donni. As part of his private campaign he turned the demons the mage had summoned back at the Karsites. This left the Karsite populace ready to listen when a young man calling himself The Prophet began to preach. The Prophet insisted that Karse had been cursed by Vkandis for using mages in the war, and that this was the source of their troubles. The only solution was to eradicate magic in Karse. He eventually found support in the Vkandis priesthood, with corrupt priests using this as an avenue to grab power. Without independent mages in Karse, there would be no one to tell that the "miracles" of the corrupt priesthood were actually magic in disguise. As part of the holy crusade, all mages not secretly employed by the church were either chased out of Karse or burned at the stake. With the mages gone, The Prophet then turned his attention to the "witches," those with Gifts of mind-magic. Those who didn't make it across the border were also consigned to the flames. It was this stance that turned the Valdemaran-Karsite mutual enmity into a deep and abiding hatred, with continuous border raids and skirmishes, occasionally flaring up into outright warfare, for the next two hundred years. Though probably more of a figurehead than he believed himself to be, the Prophet eventually became The Prophet-King, ruler of Karse. "Reborn" Prophet Ten years into Kerowyn's time as Captain of the Skybolts mercenary company, the Skybolts were hired by King Faramentha of Rethwellan to aid the Rethwellan army in repelling the invasion of a woman claiming to be The Prophet reborn. This woman had raised a good-sized army on the strength of her charisma and "miracles" and had used it to invade the Rethwellan province just south of Menmellith. King Faram suspected the provincial governor was in league with The Prophet, an assessment with which Kerowyn agreed. In the end, Kerowyn's horse archers took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity and, against terrible odds, used fire arrows to set fire to the shrine of Vkandis that accompanied The Prophet's army. Seeing the shrine of their sun god burn down convinced The Prophet's followers that Vkandis had turned against them. They panicked, leading to a total rout as they fled back across the border into Karse. The Skybolts "only" lost about a quarter of the the troops that attacked the shrine. After that the Rethwellan army easily took the field with fairly light casualties. Unfortunately for Karse, the Crown of Prophecy, the crown of the Son of the Sun, went missing when The Prophet disappeared. It was later replaced by Vkandis himself when he crowned Solaris. In the series * Magic's Price, The Last Herald-Mage series, volume 3 * By the Sword Category:Characters Category:Monarchs